In this file photo, Michigan's top federal politicians are calling on U.S. President Barack Obama to appoint a "senior" White House official to ensure the $1-billion downriver Windsor-Detroit bridge soon gets built.

Canada’s decision to pay for the plaza on the U.S. side of the new Windsor-Detroit bridge doesn’t change anything material — but it does eliminate the last bit of bad PR haunting the project.

It’s just an appearances thing, really. The funding of the $300 million plaza on the U.S. side — which technically should have been paid for by the U.S. federal government — was never going to derail the project.

The 10-lane bridge (six traffic lanes plus two shoulder lanes in each direction, I’m told) was going to get built no matter who paid for it. The original plan was for each country to pay for their own customs plazas. Now both will be rolled into the final cost and both will be covered by tolls.

The funding decision either raises the tolls by a fraction or drags out the length of the payback period by a few years. That’s about the total impact of it.

But however illusory it was, the mere doubt of who would cover the cost of the plaza — “Isn’t there still a problem with the funding or something?” — was a cloud over the project. Now it’s history.

I missed this wrinkle the last time I wrote about the DRIC/NITC bridge. But they clearly couldn’t let the uncertainty hang over the project for the next five years.

That loose end, had they allowed it to flap in the breeze while the project moved through the bidding and approval process, would have damaged the positive public relations effect the new crossing is going to have on regional trade and investment.

“I never thought it was in jeopardy,” a very pleased Windsor Mayor Drew Dilkens said Monday. “I always thought they’d pull it off” — meaning the plaza funding.

But the fact they’ve done so this early, well before the request for construction and operation proposals go out, “really sends a strong signal that the project is going ahead,” Dilkens said.

“The doubts have been removed. This provides certainty.” And certainty, as lenders all know, is the mother of investment. Which is what mayors care about.

The public will never learn all the details of what gets invested where, or how many permanent new trade jobs are created because of the crossing. Whatever they are, those investments are now likely to occur sooner because the outcome of the project is now beyond question.

The positive effect of the funding settlement was almost immediate. The announcement made the front page of Bond Buyer Magazine, datelined out of Dallas: “$3.3 Billion P3 Bridge Project Moves Forward.”

According to the century-old financial daily, $950 million in bonds will be sought from private investors to fund the structure itself. The payback period via the tolls is expected to take 50 years, their report said.

The bridge portion of the project will cost about US $1 billion, Bond Buyer says, while the plazas will cost between $250 million and $300 million each. The rest of the total is the cost of the highway interchanges leading to the structure on each side of the border.

But those figures or the amortization period may now have changed if both plazas are to be paid for with tolls, too.

According to the magazine, the more important part of last week’s agreement was Washington’s acquiescence to paying $100 million in equipment and setup costs for the customs plaza on the U.S. side of the border, plus $50 million per year in perpetuity to staff it.

Many Americans are taken aback at Canada’s eagerness to pay for each new cost of the bridge and our ferocity in pushing the project forward.

“Why are they so anxious to get this done?” WJR morning show host Frank Beckmann asked Monday when he had the director of Michigan’s Department of Transportation on his radio show.

“Why are they so hasty to spend their money and get the bridge finished?” Beckmann asked Kirk Streudle, who has been a major part of negotiations with Canada.

“That’s a great question … and I’ve gotten asked that a lot,” Streudle said. Just look at a map of where Windsor and Detroit sit in North America’s trade routes, he told the show’s listeners, and you see why the bridge is “Canada’s economic lifeblood.”

“They really understand what international trade is all about,” Streudle said of the officials he had dealt with in Ottawa. That’s high praise for the focus and competence of our federal government and the bureaucrats at Transport Canada.

Streudle, who was appointed to his job by Mich. Gov. Rick Snyder, seemed delighted that Canada gets it and stepped in when Washington let his side down. “It really was great news,” he said Monday.

We may never know the politics behind the U.S. government’s refusal to pay for its own plaza. But they don’t matter now.

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